Lists & Articles

Podcast #265: Chess of the Wind (1976) & The World Cinema Project

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Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976).

00:00 Welcome
02:11 Obsession (2026)
09:09 Microcosmos (1996)
18:42 The Housemaid (2025)
25:55 Maya Deren

32:54 The World Cinema Project
41:09 Chess of the Wind (1976)
1:09:39 Lucía (1968)
1:33:58 The Night of Counting the Years (1969)
1:51:01 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

On the Ethics of Piracy

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My local video store is run as a non-profit, and one of their ongoing community projects is to offer a window display residency. Artists submit their design concepts, and award recipients get the opportunity to actualize their ideas. Right now, that display is a testament to film piracy: 

Unless you’re a real cinemaniac, you’ve probably never seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a bizarre forty-three-minute cult film created in 1987 by Todd Haynes. In it, the strife between Karen Carpenter and her (according to the semi-biographical film) controlling brother Richard plays out, with all characters being portrayed by Barbie dolls. Memorably, Karen’s worsening health due to her anorexia is demonstrated by her doll being slowly whittled away. If you have seen Superstar, then the only reason you’ve ever had the opportunity to do so was through piracy. Whether because the use of Barbies does not fall under fair use, because of the presence of contemporary music that is unlicensed, or just because Richard Carpenter raised a big enough stink about it, there’s no way for you to watch this film legally. A copy exists at the Museum of Modern Art, but it is not exhibited. I personally have seen it, and the copy that I watched was on a burned bootleg Maxell DVD-R just like the one recreated in Maura Murnane’s display above. 

The question of the ethics of piracy arose recently when I texted Brandon about whether or not we (read: I) should cover the leaked film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a continuation of the animated 2005-2008 Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, following the show’s child characters into young adulthood (some of them had also appeared as elderly characters in continuation series The Legend of Korra). AATLA was set to be released theatrically this year, but Paramount opted to pull the film from its planned cinema release and drop it solely to their streaming service, Paramount+. This announced change ruffled some feathers. Fans who wanted to see the film on the big screen and would have happily paid to do so would now have to sign up for a subscription service to see it, and at a reduced scale than the creators intended; members of the crew and animation teams were likewise disappointed to learn that something that had been created to be visually stunning and grand in scope would not get the opportunity to reach the intended audience. Universally, the decision to paywall the film in the winter was met with criticism. Avatar fans who want to have access to that content are more likely to already be subscribed to Paramount+ in the first place, meaning that the addition of the film to the service would likely have a negligible effect on overall subscription numbers. The money was already spent, there would be no chance for the film to recoup its budget theatrically, and the hellscape that is the current streaming service subscription model grinds on. 

In general, although Swampflix and its contributors in no uncertain terms do not recommend piracy, as a legal disclaimer, I’m flexible about what this means for works that are inaccessible due to rights-holders’ choices and decisions. Consolidation of the ownership of all media into a few conglomerates is a bad thing. Even the least cinemanic among us have cottoned on to the fact that every streaming service is less functional, robust, and egalitarian they they once were, and the national government’s antipathy against monopoly prosecution in the death throes of our current economic era mean that it’s only going to get worse. The next inbound round of money-laundering square-dancing means that next year the guy who makes your toothpaste might also own The Little Rascals, or that every time you buy corn chips you’ll be adding a nickel to an account that will eventually fund a live-action Rocko’s Modern Life, or that some anarchocapitalist’s nepotistically inherited pyramid scheme will get to decide whether you can make Dorothy Gale’s slippers ruby or not. The back catalogs of films that are gatekept behind faceless entities are held back not so that said entities can do something with them, but just to keep others from having access. 

Or, more frequently in recent years, to cancel huge, completed projects because not releasing them to the public means that they can be written off for tax purposes. It’s far from the worst thing that most of the 1% has done, but like most of their unethical actions, it’s rooted in the seed of all evil: a love of money. A couple hundred internet malcontents with too much time on their hands managed to leverage a global pandemic into browbeating Warner Brothers into releasing a supposed “lost” film at a time when productions were shut down. This emboldened probably the worst people it could have, but it also means that nothing is really set in stone. Three years after its cancellation was announced, Coyote vs. Acme is finally being released this August; maybe there’s even some hope that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl might see the light of day someday. But as Brandon pointed out to me when I texted him, there wasn’t really a good reason to review the animated Avatar film when it had a real scheduled release date, even if its release was a downgrade. That’s a different story.

I won’t reveal the circumstances under which I viewed Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Maybe someone was screening it at a bar, a bar that has since closed down and therefore no one can be held responsible. Maybe I watched it through a storefront window like a kid in a corny Christmas commercial. Maybe someone burned a bunch of copies onto Memorex DVD-Rs and let them fall off of the back of a truck. A full review will come, when the film is legally available. I would recommend that, should the winds change and you get the chance to see it theatrically, it will be well worth the cost of the ticket. As to whether it will be worth the cost of the subscription to Paramount+, only you, dear reader, know if you’re responsible enough to cancel before the renewal date if Avatar Aang is all that you want to see. I’m not entirely sold on the new voice cast (in short, Toph is pretty good, Katara is acceptable, Aang is iffy but occasionally perfect, and—all love and respect to Steven Yeun—Zuko is completely wrong), but the film is absolutely gorgeous. I struggled to adjust to the cast changes and what I perceived as tonal changes, but by the time Aang was soaring around and having a good time, so was I. I had missed him, and it was good to spend time with him again. If anything, Paramount’s bungling of this whole debacle means that it’s unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity again (unless you count the Netflix live action series, which has its own host of problems). Only time will tell. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Hardest Working Prop in Hollywood

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Until 1956’s Forbidden Planet screened at The Prytania last week, I had only ever watched it as a VHS tape, fuzzed out and color-faded on a squared-off TV screen. It’s easy to take the movie for granted as an Atomic Age sci-fi novelty in that format, where it resembles any number of 1950s space adventures of the Buck Rogers mold. Revisiting it in CinemaScope on the big screen painted a much clearer picture of just how extravagant its production was for that genre. If anything, Forbidden Planet is the Atomic Age sci-fi novelty. Between its flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, mini-skirted alien babes, and Mid-Century Modern decor, it stands as the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi, a perfect specimen. Its influence on all space-adventure sci-fi to follow is also glaringly apparent in retrospect. Within the first five minutes, the Earthling astronaut heroes step into a light-beam transporter device that looks suspiciously like the ones on Star Trek; the yellow text scroll of its original trailer looks suspiciously like the opening prologues of classic Star Wars films. Not for nothing, composers Bebe & Louis Barron’s far-out analog synth soundtrack is also cited as the first feature-length electronic score in movie history, overloaded with futuristic beep-boop sounds that would change the shape of music forever, in cinema and beyond. I was delighted by the Barrons’ opening credit for “electronic tonalities,” since what they were doing with their self-invented gadgetry was so experimental the studio unions weren’t convinced it technically qualified as music. I was even more delighted by the similar credit “introducing Robby the Robot” in that sequence, though, as if Forbidden Planet‘s breakout robo-star was a working actor instead of a movie prop.

Robby the Robot should be familiar to any movie lover regardless of their personal interest in Atomic Age sci-fi or whether they know Robby by name. His image is synonymous with the genre, to the point where he earned the nickname “the hardest working robot in Hollywood” for how often he was referenced in other works. Robby has dozens of acting credits on IMDb, ranging from speaking roles in vintage TV shows like Lost in Space, Twilight Zone, and Columbo to uncredited background cameos in Gremlins, Explorers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and even a few movies not directed by Joe Dante. His continued popularity after his “introduction” in Forbidden Planet was at least partly genuine, since he is an instant charmer in that big screen debut. Robby was introduced to audiences as a kind of robot butler & 3D printer, always available to serve cocktails and fabricate gem-studded haute couture gowns at the simplest request. His flat vocal affect (provided by actual-human actor Marvin Miller) and his overly buff body design also made him an oddly manly screen presence, so bulkily muscular that he had to toddle across the screen like a baby taking its first steps. A lot of Robby’s continued public circulation after Forbidden Planet was an effort from MGM to recoup a return on investment, though, since his construction for his introductory film appearance was exorbitantly expensive, estimated at nearly 7% of the film’s overall budget. That money was put to great use, affording Forbidden Planet a recognizable mascot that could sell tickets with his coneheaded good looks and dry robotic wit, but it was a huge gamble to invest so much of the special effects budget on a single prop. The only way to justify the expense, really, was to put the robot to work.

Without question, the most bizarre ploy to squeeze more return on investment out of Robby’s robo-body came the immediate year after Forbidden Planet, when the sci-fi mascot was once again billed as a big-name actor in the children’s comedy The Invisible Boy. Robby’s second acting credit only does the bare minimum to justify the logic of his screen presence, gesturing towards an offscreen time travel device that connects its 1950s suburbia setting to a future century when Robby could’ve conceivably traveled to Earth after the events of Forbidden Planet. All of this half-baked lore is effectively contained to a single postcard, briefly discussed by the father-son duo who hog most of the runtime. Personally, I prefer to take the opening credits at face value, agreeing to a reality where Robby is a working actor whose appearance onscreen doesn’t need to be narratively justified any more than his human costars’. The important thing is that Robby is given the opportunity to make friends with a young nerd in the American suburbs, offering some direct-to-consumer wish fulfillment for the target audience of sci-fi adventures like Forbidden Planet. Then, a dirty Commie supercomputer hijacks Robby’s programming, temporarily turning him evil and overriding his prime objective to do no harm to living beings. He gets up to increasingly ridiculous, nefarious deeds in his second outing: turning the young boy invisible, kidnapping him to the moon, and getting hit with a military-grade flamethrower for his troubles. Then, he finally snaps out of it and becomes the Robby we all know & love in the final scene. All’s well that ends well, I guess, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the Father Knows Best familial dynamics that continue in the subtly abusive family home Robby invades, in which spankings are frequent and other expressions of parental affection are difficult to come by.

The Invisible Boy is kiddie stuff, but it’s at least memorably deranged kiddie stuff. There’s a brief comedic sequence after Robby first turns his young friend invisible that threatens to run out the rest of the runtime with slapstick hijinks (again, mostly involving unseen spankings). Instead, the movie gets admirably bizarre in its scene-to-scene plotting, diverting attention from Robby’s new homelife to the evil machinations of a treasonous supercomputer, hellbent on ruling the world in an AI takeover by hypnotizing the humans at its controls. That computer is about the size of an average home’s living room, but it’s said to contain the sum total of human knowledge in its memory banks the same way the cavernous underground computers in Forbidden Planet were explained to contain the sum total of space-alien Krell knowledge. Any of The Invisible Boy‘s direct connections to Forbidden Planet could only diminish it in comparison, though, since that bigger-budgeted work was set entirely in a sound stage otherworld (the first of its kind in that regard as well), while the action sequences of its kinda-sorta follow-up mostly amount to military goons firing blanks at its most expensive prop in an open, barren field. Whenever Robby’s not onscreen in The Invisible Boy, the audience is asking, “Where’s Robby?,” whereas he’s just one of many wonders in Forbidden Planet, competing with flying saucers, psychic monsters, and laser battles for the audience’s attention. It sure is fun to imagine what life would be like with Robby hanging around as your big, buff robo-butler as a child, though, which makes the overall appeal of The Invisible Boy immediately apparent. We all wish we could spend more quality time with our good friend Robby, which is partly why he has never truly gone away. He’s always hanging around in the background somewhere, chilling and collecting royalty checks from past acting gigs.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #264: Harpya (1979) & Raoul Servais

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Welcome to Episode #264 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and returning guest Joey Laura to discuss a selection of films from experimental Belgian animator Raoul Servais, starting with his Palme d’Or winning short Harpya (1979).

00:00 Welcome
06:16 Raoul Servais
11:49 Harpya (1979)
20:00 Other works

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Deren to Dream

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The biggest shakeup for me on the latest edition of the Sight & Sound Top 100 list was not the much-discussed displacement of Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the #1 slot by Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, but the total elimination of one of the precious few short films on the list: Buñuel & Dalí’s 1920s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou. The only thing that lessened the sting of that loss from the canon-defining list was that another surreal masterwork was added to take its place: Maya Deren’s 1940s follow-up Meshes of the Afternoon. Whereas Un Chien Andalou is a free-association free-for-all that defies any ascribed linear narrative, Deren’s later mutation offers more tangible themes, characters, and progression from scene to scene. Remarkably, it loses none of the dream-logic surrealism in the process, simulating the out-of-body experience of a young woman taking an ill-advised afternoon nap and becoming unmoored from reality as a result. Like Un Chien Andalou, its dreamworld iconography is foundational to the artform, recalling monumental works to follow as daunting & disparate as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Often cited as “The Mother of the Avant-Garde,” Deren collaborated with then-husband Alexander Hammid to translate her artistic background in dance & poetry to reinvent cinema as a medium in works like Meshes. She traveled internationally with her films, staging lectures & debates to reshape public perception of what The Movies are and what they could be. Anyone who watches Meshes of the Afternoon instantly understands her to be one of the medium’s all-time greats, just as worthy of prominence on the Sight & Sound list as Buñuel (who, as of 2022, has fallen off the publication’s prestigious Top 100 list entirely).

So, after years of respecting Deren as one of the all-time greats based on that one title alone, I figured I was overdue to catch up with the rest of her work. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray disc The Maya Deren Collection is as good of a crash course in her greater catalog as any, making for a much clearer, more concise compendium than the Wikipedia articles listing her most notable works among her unfinished projects. After spending an evening with that collection, it’s clear to me that Deren has at least a trio of films worthy of the all-timer status Meshes now enjoys. 1944’s At Land and 1946’s Ritual in Transfigured Time are just as essential to appreciating Deren’s artistry as Meshes of the Afternoon, something Deren seemed to be aware of herself when she screened that exact trilogy under the banner “Three Abandoned Films” in New York City in 1946, in one of her earliest art-scene triumphs. For its part, At Land feels like a direct beach-trip sequel to Meshes, like those TV movie sequels to sitcoms where the cast goes on a tropical vacation. Deren’s dazed everywoman washes up on a mysterious shore, then impossibly sprints through interior & exterior spaces in the exact looping, interpretive-dance logic she puzzles her way through in Meshes. By the time she made Ritual in Transfigured Time, she feels more firmly rooted in New York City, staging an East Coast cocktail party where guests continually move affectionately towards each other but never convincingly make contact — every single interaction belonging in the next day’s “Missed Connections” newspaper column. As a trio, they hardly feel like Deren’s “abandoned films”; they’re by far her most convincingly complete, accomplished works.

The other Deren titles considered to be her major works all register as camera tests, sparks of ideas put to greater use in her “Three Abandoned Films” masterworks. The most stunning of these camera tests is 1945’s A Study in Chorography for the Camera, in which a muscular dancer spins with such precise, relentless fury that he stops resembling a ballerino and starts resembling a multi-faced deity. That ferocity is again echoed in 1948’s Meditation on Violence, which similarly documents & abstracts the dance-like movements of a Wu-Tang style martial artist, teetering on the border between ballet & violence. By the time Deren got to the 1950s, her ideas were less cutting-edge but no less fascinating, culminating in the film-negative outer space fantasia of 1955’s The Very Eye of Night, in which balletic performers are superimposed over the Zodiacal cosmos. Any one of these shorts would kill as a background projection at a hipster house party or a living room punk show, emphasizing visual splendor over theme or narrative. As a group, they feel like watching an avant-garde filmmaker invent the music video as a medium in real time, which is a bizarre takeaway given that they are intentionally silent, with no sound component to match the musicality of their dancers’ movements. The way she manipulates those movements by playing with projection speeds and backwards looping in the edit are interesting as standalone ideas, but those ideas are put to much more coherent use in, say, the backwards tides of At Land or the freeze-frame human statues of Transfigured Time.

The most baffling entries in Deren’s filmography are the ones where sound was added in later edits. Whereas At Land will feature silent footage characters engaging in a vigorous walk-and-talk, 1947’s The Private Life of a Cat has since been edited to include a narration track that explains every action & intention of its subjects. The result practically feels like an industrial or educational short for a 1950s Biology classroom, to the point where it’s confusing to see it listed as an “experimental film” at all. I cannot tell if that designation carries on because of who made it, when it was made, or because of how notoriously difficult it is to work with cats. In any case, Deren & Hammid document the live birth & early parenting of a litter of kittens in their NYC apartment, later ascribed meaning in narration that compares the domesticity of the modern housecat against the ferocity of their wild-predator ancestors. It’s one of the longest titles and also one of the most straightforward, a combination repeated in her final work, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which was completed posthumously in the 1970s. Divine Horsemen looks & sounds like Anthropology 101 homework, documenting the dancing rituals of Vodou religious practices, which became a major interest of Deren’s late in her life. At nearly an hour in length, though, the relentlessness of the dancing does gradually evoke a kind of genuine delirium in the audience, especially if you can tune out the dryly academic narration track added after her death. As Deren’s films got less visually experimental, they paradoxically became more aligned with the ritualism of Kenneth Anger’s work, just with different spiritual interests. She was more interested in Vodou than in cinema, only using the latter to access the physical poetry of the former.

Frustratingly, the rest of Maya Deren’s catalog appears to be unfinished or unpublished in one way or another. I could find no useful information about 1949’s Medusa or 1959’s Season of Strangers other than their online listings in her filmography. Meanwhile, 1951’s Ensemble for Somnambulists did not make the cut for the Kino Lorber disc, but once you watch it on YouTube, the reason for its exclusion is immediately apparent. It feels like an early-sketch camera test for the film-negative space ballet of The Very Eye of Night, which itself is already thinly conceived. The only exclusion from Kino’s Maya Deren Collection that I can really fault is 1944’s The Witch’s Cradle, which pulls on the same artistic strings as her masterful trio of “Abandoned Films.” Unlike that now-canonized trio, The Witch’s Cradle was actually abandoned in that it was left unfinished, but its surviving footage (also available on YouTube) features some of her most strikingly surreal, darkly magical images. Its cloistered apartment setting and yarn-stringed spiderwebs suggest that Deren reworked its basic ideas into the more accomplished & coherent Transfigured Time, but it’s got enough of its own distinct texture & personality that I wish she saw the project through to completion. In general, her filmography feels frustratingly incomplete, since cinema only appears to have been one of her many artistic & spiritual interests, among poetry, dance, Vodou ritual, Leftist labor organizing, and whatever else struck her fancy on the fringes of NYC social life. She pounced on the medium with great ferocity, then wandered away from it like a bored housecat, distracted by her next momentary prey. Even the three great works we got out of her before she moved on were self-described as “Abandoned Films,” a series of dreams that she awoke from, dazed.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Universal’s silent-era adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starring Lon Chaney as The Phantom.

00:00 Welcome
03:30 Forbidden Planet (1956)
11:34 The Drama (2026)
23:55 Blue Heron (2026)
30:08 Mother Mary (2026)
40:14 Erupcja (2026)
45:22 The Beekeeper (2024)
51:08 Ronin (1998)

58:15 The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Smells Like Dean Spirit

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James Dean has been on my mind a lot lately, and not entirely by choice. New Orleans is lucky to now have two weekly repertory programs in Gap Tooth and Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies, where until recently we only had the latter. The two series both operate in their own hermetic headspaces, and their weekly film selections rarely speak to each other in any discernible way. So, it was a little jarring that the same week Gap Tooth screened David Cronenberg’s Crash, in which Elias Koteas restages James Dean’s vehicular death as an act of ritualistic foreplay, The Prytania happened to program Dean’s major bid at traditional movie stardom: the 1955 Steinbeck adaptation East of Eden. This was a coincidence, of course, as the two films are only truly linked in their shared highlight of James Dean as an Old Hollywood icon – a status solidified by Eden and later perverted by Crash. What struck me about that coincidence was a reminder during Harry Griffin’s introduction to East of Eden that Dean had only filmed three major film roles before his shocking death at age 24, two of which received posthumous Oscar nominations after his infamous car wreck. It was simple math, but I couldn’t help but dwell on the equation as the pre-film Looney Tunes short rolled . . . If we had already covered James Dean’s performance in the epic melodrama Giant a couple years back, and I was about to see his most prestigious performance in East of Eden, that means I’d only have one Dean role left to see to complete the trio. Wait a second, how had I gotten that far into his filmography without having seen his most iconic role in Rebel Without a Cause, the one that made him a star? Isn’t it a little weird that I’ve repeatedly watched James Spader get a boner at the thought of Dean’s death in Crash, or Tommy Wiseau whine “You’re tearing me apart!” at top volume in grotesque Dean caricature in The Room, but I’ve never bothered to witness Dean in all of his teen-rebel glory first-hand? I felt some deep shame about this realization all the way through East of Eden‘s blank-screen overture, making a mental note to finish my homework as soon as I got home.

Thinking back on it now, my lack of urgency in catching up with James Dean’s filmography might be that I felt as if I already knew everything I needed to know about him from still photographs. This assumption was, of course, ludicrous. In my mind, James Dean was a cool, laidback bad boy, forever leaning on a nearby tree with a cigarette hanging causally from his lips. That’s what he conveys as a photographic model, anyway: 1950s devil-may-care machismo. His actual movie roles tell an entirely different story. In both Rebel Without a Cause & East of Eden, Dean is a gnarled knot of dorky teenage emotions, more hormones than man. His brow is forever furrowed in some internal debate about what to do with his awkward body next, seemingly always on the verge of sex or violence but choosing to whine in agony instead. His infamous “You’re tearing me apart!” line reading where he contorts his face in Mad Magazine-style caricature arrives mere minutes into the film’s opening sequence, not its emotional climax. We meet Dean as a rich-boy teen reprobate spending the night in his local police station’s drunk tank until his mentally checked-out parents arrive to throw money at the problem, bailing him out. Sure, he looks cool in his iconic red bomber jacket, which director Nicholas Ray transforms into a pop-art fashion piece just as iconic as Dorothy’s ruby slippers or that little squiggle on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt. Dean’s road-to-ruin antics as a teen rebel in peril are just far more anguished & whiny than you’d expect from the movie’s still frames. Onscreen, he expresses way more of the hormone-addled anxiety of being an actual teenager than he does the idealized teen-rebel cool you’ll see him exude as a still image on dorm room posters. I have to assume that’s a major factor as to why he was so popular with the youth of the era. The basic concept of a “teenager” was a Boomer-generation invention in the wake of WWII, and James Dean was there at ground zero to embody the exact puberty-pained animalism that defines that state of being – just as much of a hormonal monster as The Teenage Werewolf.

There’s some exciting tension in watching Studio System directors like Nicholas Ray & Elia Kazan attempt to match Dean’s off-kilter method actor energy in their filmmaking style. For his part, Ray goes full pop art, blowing up the Roger Corman teen crime picture to blockbuster scale. Elia Kazan is a little more subdued in East of Eden, taking the historical literature origins of its source text just as sincerely & somberly as George Stevens does in Giant. That is, until you get to the scenes in which Dean fights with his father. Surprisingly, East of Eden is just as much of a “Parents just don’t understand!” teen screed as Rebel Without a Cause, except instead of Dean’s internal crisis being triggered by his own participation in a deadly game of chicken, he’s challenged by the discovery that his estranged mother is not, as he was originally told, dead; she’s just the madame of a popular brothel one town over. This puts the sheltered farm boy at direct odds with his overly pious father, who’s always treated him with an unspoken disgust as the product of his mother’s sins. The film is grandiose in scale, using its wide CinemaScope framing to capture the great rural expanse of turn-of-the-century America. Then, in scenes where Dean’s protagonist confronts his father in domestic squabbles, that same CinemaScopic frame feels wildly inappropriate. Kazan (in collaboration with cinematographer Ted McCord) tilts the camera at extreme Dutch angles during their indoor power struggles, matching Dean’s off-kilter emotional state with a literally off-kilter camera. It’s an outright perverse use of the CinemaScope format, especially during a third-act fight when Dean menacingly lunges at his father from a tree-rope swing and the camera see-saws in either direction with every sway. It’s so disorienting that it’s nauseating. Ray pulls a similar trick in Rebel Without a Cause, often shooting Dean from an extreme low angle that emphasizes the potential for violence in his character’s big teenage emotions and newly embiggened teenage body. The fact that Dean was visibly in his 20s playing these roles only makes the images more confusing & grotesque.

All of James Dean’s teenage whininess, awkwardness, and animalistic capacity for violence are front & center in these leading-man roles, and they do nothing to diminish his sex appeal. In East of Eden, he unwittingly woos his brother’s buttoned-up fiancée, who finds herself jealous of the sexual freedom the local “bad girls” get to enjoy while following him around like puppies. In Rebel Without a Cause, he goes out of his way to woo a local bad girl, and he happens to pick up a homosexual admirer along the way in Sal Mineo, who likewise makes puppy eyes at his chosen master. These wayward teenage girls (& boy) sense a kindred spirit in Dean’s open-hearted rebelliousness, admiring the way he expresses their internal emotional torment on his movie-star-handsome exterior. He wasn’t explosively popular because he looked cool smoking a cigarette; he was popular because he was wildly uncool – overheated, even. In retrospect, that makes the perversion of his iconography in Crash even funnier in retrospect, given that Cronenberg’s characters are all deliberately stripped of any discernible human emotion, making them the philosophical opposite of the idol whose death they worship. It’s the rare occasion where one of our weekly local classic movie screenings helped directly inform the other, instead of acting as cross-town counterprogramming. I thought more about James Dean that week than I previously had in my entire life, and I feel like I get him now. I can also now definitively confirm that, yes, East of Eden is his most accomplished performance, if not only because there’s so little competition.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #263: The Double Life of Véronique (1991) & Marionettes

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Welcome to Episode #263 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that feature marionette puppetry, starting with the French-Polish fantasy drama The Double Life of Véronique (1991).

00:00 Jazz Fest
06:55 Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025)
13:13 Yeast (2008)
17:33 The Birdcage (1996)
22:12 Michael Clayton (2007)
24:42 Agon (2026)

30:15 The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
54:10 A Rat’s Tale (1998)
1:12:34 Strings (2004)
1:26:42 The Vourdalak (2023)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part Two (2020-2024)

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In one of our recent end-of-the-year podcast episodes that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist by nature, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Part One of that journey can be found here. Now, come along with me for part two: 2020-2024.

2020: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Deerskin – Watched March 27, 2024

Upon Review: I, like Brandon, consistently find myself drawn to the work of Quentin Dupieux. Rubber was heavily discussed in the pretentious collegiate film circles I ran with in my youth and I had an absolute hoot of a time with Smoking Causes Coughing, which was on my 2023 end of the year list. This one somehow just slipped past me when it came out, but I did finally watch it over a year ago, and it’s stuck with me. This film, about a jacket that compels its owner to go to increasingly violent lengths in order to ensure that it is the only jacket in the world (although whether this is actually an act by a conscious entity or merely the main character’s delusion is ambiguous), is a lot of fun. Dupieux could probably have made the whole film work on that premise alone, but the complication of a local woman who buys his story that he’s in town to make a documentary starts to cut together his murder footage into something coherent, the film really goes above and beyond. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Wolf House – Watched March 18, 2026

Upon Review: A marvelous picture, top to bottom. Animation in styles I’ve never seen before or ever even considered were possible. The film is an in-universe propaganda piece about obeying your overseers in the form of a fairy tale that vacillates between stop motion, nontraditional versions of traditional animation styles in the form of time lapse painting directly onto a wall, filled with images both beautiful and grotesque. A masterpiece. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Swallow – Watched February 17, 2026

Upon Review: This film was released in March of 2020, which is why I didn’t see it. I was planning to, however, as I was anxiously anticipating its release after seeing trailers for it for a couple of months that led up to lockdown. Unlike a lot of people (who survived the pandemic), I was not someone who was suddenly blessed with an abundance of free time to make sourdough or practice guitar; my lockdown experience was a constant vacillation between twelve hour workdays and primal, rodent-like fear about the future. I don’t even remember learning that this one had ever come to streaming, and while that’s unfortunate, I also don’t think that I would have appreciated this one in its time. Perhaps it’s because Swallow, unlike The Lighthouse, is primarily concerned with the quiet, hidden, self-destructive habits that emerge from the unholy marriage of isolated boredom and previous traumas, while The Lighthouse’s frenetic madness was much more like what I experienced in quarantine. Haley Bennett is wonderful here in her understated feelings of inadequacy in the presence of her in-law social betters who are universally her moral inferiors, and I loved the performance from Elizabeth Marvel as her seemingly warm but ultimately villainous mother-in-law. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but for the wrong reasons. I wouldn’t have been in the headspace to appreciate this when I would have gotten the chance to see it. 

Possessor – Watched February 11, 2026

Upon Review: This one simply slipped past me in the stream. The Lagniappe Podcast crew watched 2012’s Antiviral in 2023, the same year that Infinity Pool released, and although I very much enjoyed the older film, I could only recognize Infinity Pool for its technical accomplishments as I could not connect with it in the least (Brandon was much more positive). A couple of years ago, I remembered that Possessor was well received at Swampflix, but I ended up watching Malignant (which I disliked but which, again, Brandon had more positive things to say about) instead due to some confusion and am only now working my way back to this one. What a ride! Possessor is an absolutely fantastic piece of art from start to finish. Andrea Riseborough plays a woman who, under guidance from Jennifer Jason Leigh, hijacks the bodies of innocent people through technological trickery and then uses them to assassinate targets. Her most recent possessee is Christopher Abbot, and as she starts to lose herself in more ways than one, she ends up fighting for domination of his body, while he manages to get a glimpse of her family and turns what shambles of a life she has upside down as he tries to figure out what’s happening to him. Gorgeously shot, masterfully performed, drenched in color, and featuring an appearance from Tiio Horn, one of my favorite underrated Canadian performers, this was a delight. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Twentieth Century – Watched December 4, 2025

Upon Review: The viewing of this film for our 2025 retrospective on previous films by some of our favorite directors of that year precipitated the very project that you’re currently reading. Director Matthew Rankin’s 2025 feature Universal Language was my favorite film of the year, and The Twentieth Century is an even more delightful picture, an utterly demented look at the career of W.L.M. King, a not particularly well remembered Canadian Prime Minister, complete with visits to “The Flesh Pits of Winnipeg,” whack-a-mole seal clubbing as part of the candidacy for governance, and the future of our neighbors to the north being determined by an ice skating race through a mirrored labyrinth. One of the funniest movies that I have ever seen. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 5.

2021: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar – Watched February 20, 2026

Upon Review: Part Josie and the Pussycats, part Romy and Michele, part SNL sketch, and just a dash of Muriel’s Wedding, this Kristen Wiig/Annie Mumolo North Dakota besties-on-vacation comedy is a delight. I love it when a comedy is so perfectly constructed that it scratches that same little itch in one’s brain that a cleverly crafted mystery story does. Everything pays off in the end: the sharp seashell bracelets, the seafood festival queen’s bizarre human cannonball tradition, and even an ocean spirit named Trish. All that, and Jamie Dornan sings to a seagull while flexing on a beach. What more could one ask for? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Mandibles – Watched January 24, 2026

Upon Review: I didn’t have much fun with this one for its first half, which features two clinically brain dead losers stumbling upon a captive giant fly and coming up with a hairbrained scheme to teach it to rob banks on their behalf. Upon discovery of the beast, they spend some time trying to find a location to “train” it, eventually discovering a remote trailer home whose occupant they force out and which the slightly taller and dumber of the two almost immediately burns down in a cooking mishap. From there they set out on the road to refuel their (stolen) car, at which point they run into a woman who believes that the taller idiot is her high school athlete boyfriend, and invites the two of them to her parents’ home for a bit. This is where things started to become much funnier and more enjoyable, as there is a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) there who can’t control her vocal volume, and the film never lets up on its comedy from there. At a breezy eighty minutes, this is worth sitting through the less exciting first half to get to the hilarious last forty. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Lapsis – Watched January 27, 2026

Upon Review: This one feels even more prescient now than it did five years ago. A man with limited employable skills takes a gig economy job as a “cabler,” which involves him going on physically demanding hikes to run miles and miles of electronic cord to connect quantum computers that appear to be used almost solely for financial transactions. The impetus for this is the ongoing chronic illness from which his younger brother seemingly suffers; on the trail, he meets a series of other cablers who fill him in on the backstory of the company, specifically the way that it gamifies obsolescence in the form of forcing the cablers to compete with automatons, and try to introduce him to the concept of collective action. In the past year, I’ve seen my city overrun with driverless cars operated by “Waymo,” and my antipathy toward them makes some people uncomfortable. For me, it was already morally and ethically wrong for rideshare companies to infiltrate urban markets, drive out any taxi/cab infrastructure already in place through lower pricing, then immediately raise those prices sky high the moment that they achieved market dominance. The only positive that came from it was the “agency” that these companies offered to drivers to “be [their] own boss” and “set [their] own hours,” which these new automated rideshares will likewise eventually displace, creating further shareholder value for people who are already rich enough and drive more gig workers into economic desperation. Lapsis, although it occasionally seems like it might be close to running out of steam, creates a dim-witted viewpoint character to try to recite all of the company lines about the positives of gig work and be educated otherwise. It sounds preachy, but the indie film budget, values, and casting of this one make it work. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

The Power of the Dog – Watched February 27, 2026

Upon Review: I’m not terribly familiar with Jane Campion’s filmography outside of The Piano and her TV work on the Elisabeth Moss series Top of the Lake (which I loved), but if you had asked me to describe what I thought her work was like, I probably would have described Power of the Dog. The film is very well made, featuring gorgeous cinematography of beautiful rural vistas, evocatively portraying the isolation of the Burbank house and its lands, and well-acted by all participants, even Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’m never excited to see on screen. It’s also a movie that left me fairly cold and uninvested despite all of its prestige and craftsmanship. Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) is a deeply unpleasant man deeply in the closet who mistreats his brother George (Jesse Plemmons), and drives George’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) to alcoholism via his psychological torment of both her and his new step-nephew, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who eventually bites back. It’s all very good, but it didn’t connect with me at all, unfortunately. 3.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2022: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

RRR – Watched February 25, 2026

Upon Review: What an absolute thrill! I’ve been a strong proponent of director S. S. Rajamouli’s work for a long time, ever since I first saw Baahubali 2 on the big screen (for more about that, and for our Lagniappe discussion of both Baahubali films, click here). RRR simply slipped past me in the stream; if it got a theatrical release in my city, I either missed it or was hiding out from the latest COVID variant when it screened, and it came to Netflix after I had cancelled my subscription to that service. I’m terribly sorry to have missed this one, a film about two men who find themselves on seemingly opposite sides of the British Raj of the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.), a man from the Gond tribe who comes to New Delhi to find a young girl who was stolen from their village by the wife of the British governor, and Rama Raju (Ram Charan), an Indian quisling working for the British occupiers who has been sent undercover to locate and root out the Gond tribe members who have come to the city. The two of them engage in the physics-defying rescue of a young boy from a train accident aboard a bridge, and the two of them immediately fall into passionate love with one another. This isn’t textual, of course; both have token lady love interests (the sweet English Jenny who sympathizes with the oppressed for Bheem and childhood sweetheart Sita for Raju), but let’s not kid ourselves. At the midpoint of the film, there’s a major twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s a very satisfying upending of all of the pieces on the board at this point, and I found myself coming close to cheering approximately every ten minutes for the film’s final act. Could not recommend more highly. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Funny Pages – Watched March 3, 2026

Upon Review: I first noticed actor Daniel Zolghadri in last year’s Lurker, and was pleasantly surprised to see him turn up again as one of Rose Byrne’s obsessed patients in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. He was so fresh-faced in his clean-shaven role as the would-be date rapist in Eighth Grade that it took quite a while to recognize him there, and that film used his youthful, innocent boyishness effectively by revealing the predatory nature behind his big, dark, trustworthy eyes. Funny Pages, which was sold to me as a Holdovers-esque misadventure between a high schooler and a crabby old man, likewise plays to the beardless Zolghadri’s juvenile naivete by casting him as an utterly irredeemable ingrate who seems to float by on nothing more than other people’s fondness for him. Zolghadri’s Robert is a seventeen year old who witnesses the tragic death of his beloved art teacher and decides to drop out of school to pursue his dream of being a cartoonist. To this end, he moves into a hellish basement apartment and takes a job working at the DA’s office as a floating office assistant, where he comes into contact with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a dangerous and unwell man who worked for Image Comics years ago, a fact that Robert latches onto. Here’s the thing—I didn’t find this to be funny at all. (I laughed precisely once, when Wallace claimed that “Rob Liefeld’s line work is industry standard.”) That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, but what spoke to me here wasn’t the film’s particular brand of dark comedy, which I noticed but didn’t respond to; to me, this is a story about a teenage boy who needs to perform creativity and imagination to give his life meaning, and how he seems to have been groomed to accept mistreatment by authority figures by his relationship with Mr. Katano, the art teacher. The one scene we get before he dies finds him stripping down in his office with Robert and having the boy draw him in a caricature style, and even if it’s not predatory, it’s sufficiently inappropriate that Katano follows Robert in order to elicit promises that the boy didn’t “think it was weird.” From there, Robert ends up moving into a hellish situation that brings Barton Fink to mind and where he finds his constantly sweating older roommates masturbating together over Robert’s vintage Tijuana bibles, and where he fixates on getting Wallace’s approval despite the older man’s anti-social violence, until it ends tragically. Grim stuff. 3 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2023: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Priscilla – Watched January 10, 2026

Upon Review: I’m pretty ambivalent about Sofia Coppola, but a lot of that is probably just lingering apathy about her aughts output. Regardless, this is a solid movie that’s at turns poignant, funny, and stomach-churning. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Presley in an adaptation of her autobiography in which she detailed the years she was courted by Elvis, then the most famous man in the world. Starting when she was a vulnerable fourteen-year-old girl living in Germany at an army base, Priscilla was pursued by the musician and movie star who was a decade older than her. Jacob Elordi as Elvis was the perfect casting, since he towers over the much shorter Spaeny in a visual invocation of their inherent power imbalance. The script plays cleverly with the King; if you didn’t know anything about him, one could easily interpret him as closeted in this film, given that he adamantly denies affairs with his lady co-stars and rejects them as publicity ploys as well as his complete lack of sexual overtures toward Priscilla for years while dressing her up and installing her at Graceland like a doll. His predation is still creepy and unnerving, but it somehow feels less sinister, while allowing the narrative to focus on Priscilla’s boredom with being locked away in his chintzy tower. Good stuff; 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem – Watched January 31, 2026

Upon Review: I definitely watched the late eighties Ninja Turtles in syndication in the early nineties when I was a kid, and although I remember some core concepts about it, it never imprinted on me enough for me to remember the different turtles’ personalities despite them being recited in the opening theme song. I have a fondness, but I’m not invested. I overlooked this one during a really packed summer, and because I saw a trailer for it before Barbie and saw the MPA’s PG rating assumed it was for kids. And, I mean, it is, but it’s a movie about teenaged mutant ninja turtles; it should be. The roster for non-turtle characters here is populated by A-listers and Seth Rogen’s buddies to presumably draw in a periphery demographic, but the turtles themselves are played by actual teen actors who are unknowns (to me), and they bring an energetic freshness to dialogue that manages to stay just this side of overwritten. Visually, this one is quite a treat as well, with some of the most unique animated visuals I’ve seen since the CGI revolution. I made sure to watch this on a Saturday morning, and I’d recommend others do the same. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

2024: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Taste Of Things – Watched April 12, 2026

Upon Review: I put this one off for a long time. I had no doubt that I would enjoy it, but it’s got a whopper of a run time, and I simply kept finding myself in the mood for something different whenever the opportunity arose. All throughout this procrastination, Brandon repeatedly reminded me that this film would be a pure delight, and although I never doubted him, the time was never quite right. At long last, a perfectly overcast weekend came alone, rainy but not stormy, and I whiled away a perfect afternoon in the company of the always-perfect Juliette Binoche and the less familiar Benoît Magimel, but I was nonetheless perfectly and exquisitely transported to Eugenie’s kitchen. A marvel, worthy of all the accolades it received. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Love & Pop (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut, the coming-of-age sugar babies drama Love & Pop (1998).

00:00 Welcome
01:55 Exit 8 (2026)
14:25 Project Hail Mary (2026)
22:45 Crash (1996)
26:05 Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)
36:24 East of Eden (1955)
42:55 I Married a Vampire (1987)
48:35 Time of the Gypsies (1988)
52:55 The Taste of Things (2023)
56:30 ATX Short Film Showcase
59:36 Singles (1992)
1:06:26 The Bride Wore Black (1968)
1:09:33 Trekkies (1997)

1:10:55 Love & Pop (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew